


Angel's Fall

by venividivictorious



Series: Genesis [1]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Baby Angels, Crossover Elements As Worldbuilding, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Drama, God Has A Backstory, God Has Mental Health Issues, Interspecies Relationship(s), Lucifer's Fall, Multiverse, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Sibling Rivalry, Telepathy, Universe Creation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29521962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venividivictorious/pseuds/venividivictorious
Summary: In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.So says humanity, at least. And they’re a clever little bunch - of course they are, He made them - but they’re primitive, and as primitive creatures tend to do, they got a few things wrong.For one thing, while He did create their Heavens, and their Earth, and the rest of their universe besides, His is just one dimension among the countless billions making up the multiverse.
Relationships: God & Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), God/Mother of Angels | Charlotte Richards
Series: Genesis [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168793
Comments: 24
Kudos: 40





	1. In The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> In December 2019 I started writing my Lucifer In Hell headcanons posts on Tumblr, and multiple people told me I should try and turn those into a fic. And here it is! 
> 
> A massive, massive thank you to my lovely betas, [MatchstickDolly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchstick_dolly), [AriaAdagio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariaadagio), [StartingAtMidnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/startingatmidnight) and [Incalyscent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incalyscent)

> _"I still remember the first moment we met. There was nothing, just darkness...and then She appeared. It did not take long for us to light up the universe."_ \- **God Johnson, 2x16 _God Johnson_**

* * *

In the beginning, God Created the Heavens and the Earth.

So says humanity, at least. And they’re a clever little bunch - of course they are, _He_ made them - but they’re primitive, and as primitive creatures tend to do, they got a few things wrong.

For one thing, while He did Create _their_ Heavens, and _their_ Earth, and the rest of their universe besides, His is just one dimension among the countless billions making up the multiverse.

For another: the word ‘almighty’, while flattering, is a bit of an exaggeration. He’s pretty powerful even for His species, but even He cannot claim dominion over the entire multiverse; He’s omnipotent only in the universes He Created.

The thing about human religion is that almost all of them got at least _something_ right. He exists, which is always a good start. He was born as one of a pantheon of almost five billion sibling spores, so that’s a point for the Hindus and their many gods, but He’s the only deity in the universe He Created - a cheer, if you please, for the Abrahamic religions - but none of them got the whole story.

Not that He can blame them. He doesn’t exactly communicate with humans in person all that often. Usually He’d either send a messenger, like His son Gabriel, or...He doesn’t know...carve His commandments into stone so humanity couldn’t conveniently “forget” them.

But it’s about time, He thinks, to share His perspective with humanity. His memories, His story, just as He lived it. Which brings Him to the third thing humans got wrong.

That wasn’t the beginning.[1]

* * *

His story began in a nursery dimension[2] in the multiverse’s quiet Outer Rim[3], where He was born to a telepathic, extra-dimensional entity who, for the sake of a human audience, He’ll call ‘Mother’[4].

When He looks in the mirror these days, the face that looks back at Him is indistinguishable from a human’s. It’s a fairly average face; pale-skinned and dark-haired, with untidy dark curls and a close-cut beard that’s still mostly pepper, just a little salt. He’s got faint laugh lines at the edges of His eyes, which have been blue ever since He gave Himself that sweet little mutation evolution churned up a few hundred thousand years back. He’s a casual guy, the hoodie-jeans-and-sneakers type. He’d melt seamlessly into a crowd.

‘Made in His image’, humans like to claim. Technically they’re right - they look as He does now - but this is a form He gave Himself, not the one He was born with. Back then He looked very different; virtually identical to His billions of siblings, each about the size of planet Earth with twelve dextrous tendrils and a soft flowerlike body with several petals of delicate membrane to propel Him through the vast expanses of deep space.

His childhood was mostly spent drifting through the empty nursery universe in the wide slipstream created by Mother’s immense body, dozens of times the size of His own, coasting on solar flares and racing His siblings. He fed on certain kinds of energy that have no equivalent in the human universe, absorbing them directly through the waxy cuticle of His mantle, and He ‘saw’ in radiation patterns, a colourless, pixelated scan with way more than three dimensions. He communicated telepathically then, in a language more whalesong than words.

Theirs was a peaceful, loving family. They weren’t exactly a hive-mind - they were individuals, all of them, and sometimes He’d bicker with His siblings or disagree with Mother. But it was difficult to hold grudges or build resentment against someone whose mind you have full, unfettered access to. He’d been able to see exactly where they were coming from when they fought, known exactly why they felt as they did. So their bickering was usually quickly resolved and their sibling rivalry, for the most part, completely absent.

With that connection came access to Mother’s memories, where He learned the history of His people. His is one of a small number of species capable of crossing from one dimension to another. They’re the caretakers of the multiverse, crafting new universes and pruning dying ones, a guiding hand on the steering wheel of evolution. Or...they were, once. According to the stories Mother had learned from her own parent, there were precious few of them left, and more and more universes were being left to develop on their own.

He was the precious next generation of a dying breed[5]

* * *

While they follow Mother on her long, endless migration, they would work together to fill the universe. She had billions of years of expertise in the delicate art of Creation, and her works were an exercise in artistic elegance. They learned from watching her put celestial bodies together atom by atom, manipulating matter with her sensitive tendrils into the most exquisite shapes. She taught them to weave elements into solid reality, to turn the blank canvas of an infant universe into a tapestry of worlds and wastes and stardust. They started with easy projects like asteroids - which are always fun, because you can fling them at your siblings - and graduated in a slow outward cascade to other, more complicated celestial bodies.

He likes to think He was a good brother. He was the most talented of all His siblings; the most creative, the most powerful. They were all of an age, dispersed within minutes of each other, but He was always more of a big brother figure. He’d help them get to grips with finicky tricks of Creation, and He came up with most of their games - solar flare surfing, asteroid tennis.

It was a good childhood. Happy. Peaceful. Safe.

* * *

While He was growing up in the remote, boundless expanse of deep space[6], life sprang up across the planets they left behind. Evolution produced the very simplest of organisms, barely even sentient, and by the time He hit adolescence those organisms had developed limbs and language, science and civilization, and begun to explore the stars.

Curious, expansionist little civilizations discovered one another.

And, as primitive entities tend to do, they promptly started trying to drive each other extinct, spiralling into evolutionary arms races spanning hundreds of years or the blink of an eye. Their weapons grew bigger, crueller, more cataclysmic.

The beginning of the end was a bomb. Primitive entities do love their explosives - a short, sharp end to all their problems. They destroyed cities and empires and planets and fleets, and finally they came up with something powerful enough to punch a hole in the fabric of reality itself.

He remembers the explosion - remembers everything, actually, in excruciating detail, which isn’t always the blessing humans make it out to be. His family was mid-migration at the time, halfway across the Anacrusis Nebula.

He was working on a new planet, a gas giant with a tricky atmosphere that’d been giving Him trouble. He manifested it in their shared mindspace as he worked, so they could watch and offer suggestions. Many of His siblings were doing the same thing with their own planets too, so the mindspace could get a little crowded. Mother’s awareness flitted between their projects - He could feel her pride when she was focusing on His - but she rarely offered any input unless they asked.

The flash came first, a nuclear explosion on an inconceivably massive scale, and His vision whited out completely, overwhelmed by the tsunami of radiation. Their telepathic link flooded with panic and disorientation as His tendrils groped blindly for someone - anyone - to cling to, someone to steady Him. He managed to snag someone else’s tendril and clung on tight, fighting to see an outline through the cloying radioactive smog.

He was still blind when the shockwave hit Him like a freight train.

Their entire swarm was blasted backwards by a wall of heat and rumbling sound, a song of annihilation. Whoever He was holding was ripped away from Him, squealing in terror. He broadsided something far bigger than He was - hard - and the next thing He remembers, He was coming around with His brains beating a pulsating tattoo against the inside of His head and His entire body vibrating with discomfort. His skin crawled, and it took Him a moment to realise why.

There was no one else in His head.

He knew which direction He’d need to go; the dense cloud of radiation from the explosion was still clearly visible in the distance. But He couldn’t sense Mother, couldn’t hear the thoughts of the rest of the swarm. He’d never been alone in His mind before; He’d always felt safe even in the most barren parts of the universe, because He was never alone. For an indeterminate length of time, it paralyzed Him. Isolation warped comforting darkness into sinister shapes, and radiation prickling at the tips of His tendrils contorted into a menacing presence behind Him.

He got moving eventually, of course, in fits and starts, and finally He discerned Mother’s shape in the distance. When He reached the swarm, dragging a couple of damaged tendrils, it was decimated; His siblings were still filtering back in ones and twos, and Mother was anxiously patting them down one by one to check for injuries. She dropped one of His siblings to pull Him in close, but He couldn’t hear or feel an iota of emotion from Her, and it made the affection feel eerie and disjointed. Like she wasn’t really Mother. Like she’d been replaced by some kind of...uncanny valley fake.

Halfway through her pat-down, whatever was wrong with Him fixed. His siblings’ fear, their apprehension and concern, and Mother’s love and anxiety for the spores still missing, it all finally swept over Him like the first breath of air after choking, and His song went to pieces as He clung to Mother with all His working tendrils. His siblings’ chatter crackled back into His mind as though from a long way away, little snatches of their individual songs flitting through His mind like fireflies;

_What’s wrong with Him?_

_Is He okay?_

_What was that?_

_What happened, Mother?_

“Where are they?” He asked Mother, wallowing in her affection like He could make Himself forget what that emptiness, that loneliness, felt like. “The others?”

She didn’t know. He could feel it, even as She promised, “They’ll find us. They’ll come back. They can’t have been pushed out too far. I promise, they’ll find us.”

* * *

Most of them made it back eventually.

He has no idea what happened to those that didn't.

* * *

The thing about reality is that it’s stronger than steel and more fragile than flesh, and it’s virtually unbreakable right up until it isn’t. Mother diverted their migration from the blast, and for a time they managed to avoid the worst of the destruction, but the explosion had compromised the entire universe’s structure. The whole dimension had begun to collapse. It was only a matter of time[7].

That’s not to say everything happened immediately; quite the opposite - slow to begin with, like water seeping through a crack one drop at a time. Dozens of generations of primitive entities could’ve lived and died and never known the dimension was damaged at all. But its lifespan dropped from a few trillion years to perhaps a little less than a million. So really, when you think about it...big damage. Big difference.

He can remember the first time the damage caught up to them - part of their new migration route was just not where it was supposed to be when they got to it. In its place there was just a vast field of planetary rubble, flowing slowly towards a jagged fissure in reality. The swirling patterns of time and space blurred into a blanket of white static at the edges of the laceration, just before vanishing forever. It was...rather like watching a wound bleed on rewind.

That’s where He first heard it. The Silence.

The multiverse is everything that ever was, but it is not endless. Beyond the borders of the Outer Rim is everything that ever wasn’t, an empty, ravenous waste of _nothing_. No light. No sound. No time. No matter. No living thing - not even His kind - can survive in the Silence.

Mother had told them about it when He was a spore, one of a million stories she recited on their long journey. He’d grown up knowing it was there, and knowing - in theory - that it was dangerous, in the same way a human child grows up with the knowledge that a nuclear bomb is dangerous. It was one of those things He’d never expected to see for Himself, never expected it to affect Him.

The thing He remembers best, clear as the bright ringing of the bells in the Chapel of Light, is that the Silence was _not silent_.

It was as though it spoke to Him, through that wound in reality. Many things have a song in the depths of space - spinning planets, supernovas, supermassive black holes - and He was familiar with most of them by then. But the Silence had a song of its own, like nothing He’d ever heard before, a repetitive four-note beat that slithered into His mind and made a home in the spaces between neurons, twisting grasping tentacles around His brain stem and turning everything around Him thick and syrupy as molasses.

It was _beautiful_.

 _Ba-ba-ba-dum. Ba-ba-ba-dum. Ba-ba-ba-dum_. Hypnotism in musical form.

It made Him want to come closer. Just a little bit. A little bit more and He’d be able to see, really see, what lay outside the multiverse, and then He’d understand everything. Everything that ever was or ever would be, His for the taking. He’d be able to see the Silence[8] for Himself.

_...ba-ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-ba-dum..._

He was so close. It wouldn’t hurt to go a little closer. To peek through the fissure. A small price to pay for the secrets of a place no one else had ever seen.

_...ba-ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-ba-dum…_

An inch or so more and - _yes_. There it was. The faintest glimpse of Silence[9], barely a second of exposure to it before -

Mother pulled sidelong in front of Him, disrupting the soporific drumbeat and jerking Him out of a trance He hadn't known He was in. For a second, He was just disoriented, as though He’d just come around from a hibernation. And then her fear fucking swamped Him, and He responded with panic of His own.

“Don’t look at it!” Mother howled, using her immense bulk to block the convoy and turn them all around. “Don’t any of you look at it! It will twist your minds! All your melodies will end!”

She wasn’t making sense. He hadn’t felt threatened by the Silence. He followed in a daze as she led them away as fast as they could move, heading for the safety of deep space. Hadn’t she heard the song? It was beautiful. _Peaceful_. If only she’d given Him a moment more with it, He’d - He’d have been the most powerful being that ever lived! He’d have understood the mechanics of the whole multiverse and beyond!

“You’d have been gone,” she insisted breathlessly as they raced for the stars. “That’s how it gets you. You’d have gone through that hole and you would’ve ceased to exist. Nothing can survive outside the multiverse!”

It had never occurred to Him before that any of His family would ever lie to Him. It was unthinkable, utterly pointless given their telepathic connection. But in that moment, a nauseating little something in His mind whispered, she lies.

It wasn’t His voice, that whisper. The thought didn’t come from Him, or His siblings, or Mother. It was as though something small and sly had hitched a ride in His mind when He looked through the schism. But it made sense. Perhaps she wanted the Silence all to herself. That inimitable, unforgettable drumbeat…

She just didn’t want Him to have it.

* * *

Time and space and reality swept past them as they fled across the stars, sucked towards the ravenous wound.

“What happens when we run out of universe?” one of His siblings asked once.

Mother’s answering song was grim. “You’re not spores anymore. Soon you’ll be strong enough to travel to another universe. We only have to outrun it until then.”

The thought slipped out before He could stop it, and it tasted like sickly, psychedelic colours and a hypnotic drumbeat. “What if some of us don’t get strong enough in time? Do we leave them?”

Her harsh rejection of the thought stung so brightly it was like a psychic slap. “That will not happen. We go together, or we don’t go at all.”

In a split second, He thought, _I’m not dying here_.

And - fuck, there it was again, that unsettling hitchhiker He’d been carrying. That wasn’t Him, that wasn’t their family. Valuing the one above the group wasn’t how Mother raised them. The family was everything, integral to their being. Alone, they were nothing.

Nobody acknowledged the thought, but He still felt their disgust that He’d had it.

* * *

The problem with Mother’s ‘escape as long and as fast as we can’ idea was that they were not a fast-moving species - they were interstellar titans, built like cruise liners rather than speedboats.

One by one, voices started disappearing from the orchestra of joined minds.

He - the most powerful, the strongest - was able to keep up with Mother - just about. Most of His siblings were smaller than He was. Weaker. Faster to tire. They fell farther and farther behind, their songs aspirating and fading as the effort of fleeing exhausted them until eventually they abruptly stopped singing altogether.

When He chanced a backwards look, they were just _gone_. Swallowed up by the ever-widening fissure like they never existed at all.

And with every disappearing voice, the family song edged further into ‘discordant and disturbing’. He could feel parts of Himself disappearing in time with His siblings, each one a little empty space in His mind where their consciousnesses used to be.

Fear chased horror into the depths of His gut. He was going to be cut off from them again.

Slowly.

* * *

He was not far off adulthood when they hit the far edge of the shrinking bubble of surviving universe and found themselves with nowhere left to run.

The strange thing about staring death in the face is that after a point it just sort of...ceases to matter. After thousands of years of drowning in the family’s collective fear and feeding them His own - He had no more room for fear. It had become His normal. He felt numb from it, distant, dissociated.

The siblings at the edges of the family huddle began to dematerialise, crushed to atoms in the space of a heartsbeat[10] , and perhaps He should’ve been more afraid, perhaps He should’ve been screaming, but -

There was that drumbeat again. That beautiful sound, the one He’d heard when the Silence sang to Him, and - would it really be so bad to disappear? The Silence was so much bigger, so much more elegant, so much darker than Him, than His family. Becoming one with it was nothing to fear. It wouldn’t be death, just...a change of state.

He hadn’t been able to see for some time by then. The gravitational pull of the fissure had wolfed down most of the radiation, and His vision had fragmented, blinding Him gradually, pixel by pixel. So everything in those last few moments narrowed down to pinpoints of sensation; power pulsing impotently through His tendrils, Mother’s carapace chafing against His own, His siblings scrambling and shoving from all sides. The _clinging_ in the last few bars of the song as the drumbeat drowned it out, soothing and exciting all at once, turning each of them drowsy and compliant.

But -

_Go._

It was so faint, barely a ripple in the soporific reprise dampening His awareness from root to tendrils. He thought it was His own voice, for a second, and then -

**Go!**

_Mother?_

_**GO!** _

And...She was His mother. The hold the Silence had on Him wasn’t strong enough yet to override that. Instinctively, automatically, He obeyed.

With the sensitive tips of His tendrils, He felt the fabric of the universe; the fragile barrier between this dimension and the next. It was faint - so faint - like sensing an earthquake’s rumble from halfway around the world, but it was there.

He seized that fabric in every tendril He had and yanked. Hard.

It wasn’t elegant. It was a burst of pure power, forcing His immense bulk through an opening that was far too small for Him. A scream tore through Him, all grief and feral defiance, as the space between worlds crushed Him for an infinity, choking on space dust that made Him lightheaded and giddy. He was blind in that in-between place. There was no radiation. No up, no down. Nothing at all.

And then He fell through, into another universe - His _first_ other universe. A completely different dimension, laid out quiet and peaceful before Him as though His home and family weren’t facing annihilation on the other side of a barrier no thicker than a gauze veil.

He thought He felt a last wave of emotion from Mother. Relief that He’d escaped[11] . Terror for herself. Grief for her children, the ones too weak to make the jump, the ones already under the thrall of the drumbeat, the ones she couldn’t bring herself to leave behind.

_Be safe. I love you. I’m sorry._

And then silence fell as everything He’d ever known crunched into oblivion behind Him, severing their connection for good and slamming His amateur-hour interdimensional gateway closed behind Him.

* * *

So...yeah. That’s who He is. He’s the one who survived, and He’s alive only because He abandoned them. He left them there to die. But - He didn’t mean to. It was - Mother _told_ Him to, He never wanted...He didn’t mean it. _He didn’t mean it_! He never wanted to leave them. It wasn’t His fault.

He stared at the empty patch of space where He’d come through for - ancestors, He doesn’t even know how long. Hundreds of years? Thousands? Like if He just waited long enough, they’d pop through the barrier to tell Him it was all a big joke.

For tens of thousands of years, He grieved.

If anyone heard His plaintive, lonely song, keening into the endless void…they never answered Him.

* * *

His world went dark after that. And cold. And _quiet_.

He drifted aimlessly through the multiverse, staying in each dimension just long enough to recuperate the energy to jump to the next one as loneliness stripped Him bare and the Silence in His mind ate Him from the inside out, digging down into His bones and filling the hollow in His chest[12] . Dimension after dimension passed Him by in a vague blur of radiation and sound and pain so deep it felt like half His body was missing.

He tried reaching out, especially at first, but the pitiful creatures populating the dimensions He floated through didn’t understand Him, and their stupid little minds were so primitive and useless that He couldn’t touch them at all.

Turns out, telepathy isn’t the main form of communication - or even _a_ form of communication - in a lot of universes. He's always found that distasteful.

For the longest time, while He grieved, He didn’t Create anything. Couldn’t bring Himself to do anything that made Him happy, not when Mother and billions of siblings would never Create anything again. He saved all His energy for the next jump, the next crossing, the next meaningless dimension, punishing Himself for leaving them behind. Putting as much distance between Himself and the distant Silence as possible, no matter how tantalizingly it called to Him, because that was what Mother had wanted.

And that was how it was for millions of years. His world was dark. And cold. And quiet. Just Him and the Silence.

* * *

He doesn’t even know how long He’d been aimlessly travelling when it first occured to Him that, well, Mother _told_ Him to leave. _Told_ Him to save Himself. She wanted Him to _live_.

He wasn’t living. He was existing - and only just about managing that.

The way He’d been feeling...the misery, the wallowing, the _guilt_...that wasn’t what she’d have wanted for Him.

So, after He-didn’t-even-know-how-many centuries of grief, He started...well... _living_ again, He guesses. He was alone, and He wanted _not_ to be, so over a few million years and a few dozen universes, He got creative[13] ; that’s who He is, after all, that’s what He does.

Change came slowly. He’d adapt Himself to resemble the dominant entities in whatever universe He was in at the time, cherry-picking useful features to hang onto after His next jump. He made Himself familiar, non-threatening, _approachable_ , to the pathetic little creatures He met, an eldritch alien hiding in plain sight. It’s the same thing He does with humanity now.

He became the ultimate interdimensional chameleon.

In one universe, fitting in meant cramming Himself into a form less than a tenth of His original size as the pain made His head swim and the new body’s ribcage crushed His organs. In another it meant reshaping His tendrils into weight-bearing limbs[14] and growing foreign muscles to make them work, trying to focus on a medical schematic of the species He was impersonating to put all the fucking muscles in the right places while He screamed Himself to the edge of insanity from the agony of it.

Another few thousand years, and He gained a mouth, a disgustingly wet, slimy hole in the middle of His face with a glistening, twitching block of exposed muscle smack in the middle of it. And that was great, because He got to spend the next few centuries gagging with disgust every time His new tongue touched the inside of His new cheek.

Although, there are some good things to be said for having a mouth. He could make noises at the locals, and they’d make noises back. He started learning His first spoken language. And at some point He acquired a 'stomach', and got to quit absorbing energy and actually eat something for the first time in His life. It was...a _vorik_ , He thinks, a little goat-like thing that was meant to be a delicacy...charred black over a fire, impaled on a skewer and drizzled with some sort of purple sauce, and He unhinged His jaw like He’d seen the locals do and swallowed it whole.

He got food poisoning. And then got arrested by the station security, because He didn’t have the credits to _pay_ for the vorik-on-a-stick[15] . But He also discovered _taste_ , and the positives of _that_ outweighed the negatives of the whole food-poisoning-with-a-side-of-prison debacle, and that was how He discovered He’s a bit of a foodie.

* * *

Time passed and so did dimensions. He became bipedal. Gained a nose. The transformations became smoother with practice, less painful. He learned all manner of languages. Got to know lesser entities, got to like them, even. He changed colors a few times, tried out some different skin tones. Did His best to think in words and speak with words[16] and forget that He ever knew what it felt like not to be alone in His head[17] .

It became a routine. Peaceful, in a cold-comfort kind of way. It was familiar. Acceptable. Unsurprising.

That is - until quite by chance, He met a girl.

* * *

[1] His beginning, He means. It wasn't _His_ beginning. The story of the _actual_ beginning - the very first dimension, the origin of the multiverse - was lost to time long before He was born.

[2] The multiverse is similar in shape to the funnel of a black hole. New universes bud at its edges, farthest from the centre. As they age they drift towards the densely-packed epicentre, where ageing universes spend their twilight years before their inevitable demise. The Outer Rim, populated with baby universes, is about the safest neighbourhood to be born in. If you think of the multiverse as a city, the Outer Rim is a little village on the outskirts, the kind of place where nobody locks their doors and it's still safe to play in the street.

[3] That's the ass end of the multiverse; the bit right on the outskirts where new universes are born. Think Kansas in space. Nothing much beyond that but the Silence, the primordial chaos, and He's not aware of anyone who's ventured into _that_ bad trip and come back out again.

[4] Yes, God had a mother. Or - a parent, really. They had no gender and reproduced asexually, so Mother was an 'it' - they all were - rather than a female. But she was loving, nurturing in all the ways a mother should be. He had no need of a second parent, growing up. She gave him all the love a spore needed.

[5] That will surely have changed in the billions of years since He was a spore, and not necessarily for the better. He hasn't seen another of His kind since He was young. For all He knows, He's the last living specimen of an extinct species.

[6] That's His natural habitat, the ancestral home of all His kind - the vast open spaces, the weightless ocean between worlds. He was too big, then, to dwell on a single planet. When His feet touched the ground for the first time, He was already several millennia old. Come to think of it, He was several millennia old by the time He developed feet in the first place.

[7] There are dozens of ways for a universe to end, but that...that slow, inexorable ebb until the entire cosmos shrinks to a pinpoint and finally fades away altogether - has got to be one of the least dignified. The epitome of 'not with a bang, but a whimper'.

[8] Mother had told them - warned them, even - about the Silence as infant spores. The multiverse is noisy, full of life and love and song. The Silence is what lays beyond the multiverse's borders, an endless realm of the opposite - not death, but the absence of life, absolute inhospitability to all living things. Even His kind could not survive out there. He'd never expected to see it with His own - well. Not 'two eyes', but you get His drift.

[9] He doesn't exactly remember what the Silence truly looked like. Pure nothing is beyond even His comprehension. But...He came to Earth this one time in the mid-70s. San Diego, His first trip to America. That was a fun year, but He does remember one absolutely appalling trip He had courtesy of some dodgy LSD. His memories of that trip mostly consist of a mess of swirling, oversaturated colours, darkly psychedelic with a nauseatingly sickly off-colour palette, and for some reason He can't quite explain, He's come to associate them with the Silence. It gave Him the same feeling, a stomach-turning assault on the senses, overwhelming and trippy in the very worst way.

[10] Four hearts, actually; two at the front of His body, and two at the back. Had to be like that - as a newborn spore He'd been the size of a small planet and He'd only gotten bigger. One heart in a body that size would never have cut it.

[11] Or maybe that's just how He deals with the guilt. Maybe He didn't feel anything, and He just tells Himself She was glad, because how the fuck else is He supposed to sleep at night?

He'll never know which it is.

[12] Hell, it's been billions of years since then, and He still wrestles with the loneliness every day. He's a husband - an ex-husband - and a dad, but He's never found anyone who could connect with Him like that. The loss of that telepathic connection is a hole in Him that can't be filled.

[13] He doesn't think it'd ever occurred to any of His kind to modify their own body before. He knows for damn sure that it never occurred to Mother, who taught Him all He knew. But there was nobody to tell Him that it couldn't be done, so He did it, because He's a stubborn, bull-headed bastard. And as it turns out, when you're all alone in a strange universe, that's a real good thing to be.

[14] _Some_ of His tendrils, anyway; the lesser entities all seemed to have twelve limbs or less. The ones left over eventually had to be...removed. That wasn't pleasant either. If He didn't know better He'd think the multiverse just liked to punish Him for being more advanced.

[15] Funnily enough, He had almost the exact same experience when He first moved to Earth. That's what He gets for choosing Ohio.

[16] Which was mostly successful.

[17] Which was mostly not.


	2. A Small Matter Of Creation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which God falls in love, starts a family, and grapples with the finer points of parenting technique.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A massive thank you to my lovely betas!
> 
> Also, shoutout to [KDCST](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KDCST/pseuds/KDCST) who nailed the crossover reference in the previous chapter.

> _“Once upon a time, a boy met a girl and they fell in love. They had sex. Anyway, they became Mum and Dad. They had a whole litter of kids, including yours truly, and they built a house. They called it Heaven. They were happy. Dad was...well, Dad. And Mum...Mum was rather lovely in the beginning.” -_ **_Lucifer Morningstar_ ** _, Everything’s Coming Up Lucifer_

* * *

Her name was Asherah.

He knew She was meant for Him the moment He laid eyes[18] on Her. She was alive with colour, a supernova given sentient form, brighter and more vibrant than anything He’d ever seen. Her light made a moth of Him. 

So He set about learning Her language, Enochian[19]. It wasn’t as much of a hardship as it would once have been; He’d learned a whole bunch of primitive languages over the millennia by then, in many dimensions. Enochian was - and is - a rhythmic, musical tongue, soft and smooth, and it flowed like a river from Her lips when She spoke to Him. He’d lie with His head in Her lap and mimic the movements of Her mouth as She formed words, and She’d laugh merrily at His mispronunciations[20]. He learned quickly, and Her language lent itself well to music and poetry, so He tried His hand at both, with...mixed results[21]. 

Her effect on Him was almost beyond His comprehension. It wasn’t that He was unfamiliar with the _concept_ of romantic love - He’d seen it play out a million times across time and space and species. But it was unnatural for His kind to fall in love. That had always been one of those messy, vaguely bewildering problems only primitive entities had to deal with, in the same vein as libido and war and politics. So He shyly fumbled His way through Their courtship like a real idiot, completely out of His depth, and for some reason He still can’t fathom, She gave Him a chance to win Her over. 

He wasn’t suave about it. Not even remotely. He was painfully socially awkward, blind to primitive body language cues, and He’d talk Her ear off about Creation for hours without stopping. He assumes She probably understood about twenty percent of those conversations, if that. But She seemed interested, and asked the sort of questions an infant spore might, and listened to Him enthuse with a soft, indulgent little smile nestled at the corner of Her mouth, Her chin propped against the heel of Her hand. 

She’d call Him _handsome_ , in a tone that was all sultry approval, and She said it so often He started to smile whenever He saw His own reflection, even though He had no real way of knowing if it was true. He gave Himself attractive wings, at least, elegantly arched and iridescent black like an oil slick. But...really, all primitive entities looked the same to Him[22]. At that point, He probably couldn’t have picked His own face from a crowd. 

He happily took Her admiring looks regardless, the way Her eyes caressed Him slowly from head to toe and back again, like She _sees_ Him, _really_ sees Him. It’d been so long since anyone took time to get to know Him. Longer still since He felt like He didn’t have to make Himself smaller, cram Himself into a comforting, familiar box so as not to frighten them. He could be incomprehensible and strange and alien with Her, could spend hours in Her company and not feel strained. She made it so _easy_. 

So He introduced Her to recipes He’d learned on His travels, and listened to Her play exquisite music for Him on the harp-like instrument Her homeworld was known for, and gifted Her knickknacks He’d picked up along the way, jewelry made of metals forged in the heart of stars from another dimension, elaborate journals from thousands of years ago, maps of universes She’d never be able to visit. 

She told Him She loved Him. 

_I don’t know if I can fall in love_ , He thought.

Her eyes were gleaming and hopeful as She gazed up at Him. 

He said it back. 

  
  


Time did what time does, and His relationship with Asherah deepened. She asked Him shyly not to court anyone else, and He agreed as though courting anyone at all had ever occurred to Him before Her. 

And suddenly, for the first time in His life, He found Himself grounded. 

When He’d been a spore, Mother had raised them on the move. They were migratory by nature, constantly moving throughout the nursery universe of His birth, and they would’ve continued to travel on a grander scale, multiverse-wide, had they survived long enough for His siblings to reach adulthood. In His lonely travels since losing them, He’d still never been stationary, always had another planet ahead to look forward to, and beyond that, a new dimension like a dim beacon in His future. 

But...Asherah expected Him to stay close. Continuing to migrate would mean He’d have to _leave_ Her. For years at a time. And She’d made it very clear She did not consider that an acceptable way to go about Their relationship. So for the first time, He was going to have to _settle down_. Build a home, a real one, like the primitive entities did, a single place to stay in for the foreseeable future. 

He didn’t even know what a home ought to look like. 

He knew what He _didn’t_ want, though, and that was a cramped unit in the conglomeration Her family lived in, on Her overpopulated homeworld. And that was somewhere to start, at least. 

So He worked on His home whenever He was away from Asherah. It took longer to come together that way, erratically Creating in fits and spurts in between long visits with Her, but He didn’t want to get too into it, didn’t want to risk getting distracted. He could happily focus on a project for...well - years? Longer? He’d never counted before, never had a reason to, not when everyone around Him was as enamored of their own projects as He was.. But He could certainly fixate on Creating for long enough that She wouldn’t like it. She enjoyed attention, shone brighter for it, and . 

  
  


What He Created was the very earliest version of the Silver City[23]. 

He got a little ambitious with it, He’ll admit. He could’ve adapted any unpopulated world to suit Him, but He had first-hand experience in just how unsafe a planet can be. No protection from everything happening in the wider universe. Nothing, ultimately, between you and _sickly colours_ the end _pulsing drumbeat_ of the whole _shrinking universe_ damn dimension. 

No. 

Never again. 

So He made something different. The Silver City isn’t a universe, but it’s only one step removed. Strictly speaking, it’s a pocket dimension, a bubble of space and time attached like a polyp to Asherah’s universe by a thin membrane of reality. It’s a half-second out of sync, so it has an extra layer of protection from things like dimension-ending cataclysms.

The good thing about a pocket dimension is that it doesn’t have to conform to the same set of rules as its host universe, so He got away with all sorts of physics-defying fuckery while He was building it. Slowed time. Bespoke weather. Undying gardens. It’s even expandable - back then, it was just big enough to encompass His own home, and now it’s a thriving metropolis populated by the souls of every pure-hearted human ever to die. 

The grass is green. He chose the colour at random, but He rather liked it. Green is an underrated colour in the multiverse. There’s a reason He made Earth’s plant life green. 

The jewel of the Silver City is His towering palace. Taller than the biggest skyscraper humanity has ever built and made of gleaming white stone, the White Spire is named for the elaborate decorative steeple atop its highest tower. It’s the first building He ever Created, set in an exquisite mandala of colourful gardens, and if He says so Himself, it’s an architectural marvel. 

After all, if He had to stay in one place, He was going to do it surrounded by elegance. 

Still, it was quiet. For some reason it bothered Him more in the Silver City than it had when He was travelling. From what He’d seen of primitive entities, homes were supposed to be... _full_. 

It made Him feel _lonely_ . Lonel _ier_. 

Maybe that was it. Maybe it was because He was the only one living there. Maybe He just needed more life. So He brought Asherah to visit, guiding Her to the steps of the White Spire with His hands covering Her glowing eyes. Her light flared with awe and delight when He whipped His hands away, so intense that it seemed to bathe the entire palace in its soft golden haze. 

He wanted to freeze that moment. Tuck it away so He could go back to it on bad days, whenever the Silence in His head got too loud. The warmth of the breeze, and the colours of the gardens, and the breathtaking gleam of Asherah’s smile. 

“Darling,” She breathed, clutching His hand, so enthused She was almost bouncing on the balls of Her feet. “This is _Heaven_ [24].”

He couldn’t help but agree with Her. 

  
  


One night, as He was drifting off to sleep with Her body half-draped over His, She told Him She wanted children. 

And He said, “Ah,” because...He wasn’t sure He did. He’d met a few of Her species’ offspring by then, and found them deeply disturbing. Noisy. Unclean. Always covered in some kind of filth, usually their own, screaming bloody murder at all hours of the day and night. Nothing like a spore, they were utterly dependent on their parents for _everything_ . He wouldn’t even know where to _start_. 

He had a whole laundry list of reasons why starting a family was a bad idea. Like the fact they were two different species and might not even be compatible. Or the fact that His kind normally have only one genetic parent. Or that the body He was wearing was a mixture of parts from dozens of different dimensions, and He was pretty sure that not all of those puzzle pieces were... _correctly attached_ ...on the inside[25]. 

And there was always that He’d seen firsthand how quickly a safe universe could become a lethal one. The Silver City was as safe as He could make it, but what if...what if someone found a way in? What if there were cataclysmic disasters He hadn’t considered? What if...what if...what if...?

The scenarios circled in His head like a mobile above a crib, spiralling, getting worse with every revolution. 

Asherah dismissed them all; for every hesitation, She had a fact or anecdote or gentle reassurance, to put His mind at ease. 

“It’s impossible to be lonely with a baby in the house, Elohim. Everyone worries about being a good parent until their children are born. But then the baby arrives and You just...love it. It’s natural. You will make a wonderful father. ”

She was convinced having kids was the right choice. Their next big step together. 

So it’s what They did. 

  
  


So They had...made, Created, whatever...the archangels. You know. His curse - ahem, apologies - kids[26]. 

They were the first time He actually tried to replicate His own telepathy. There were five of them at first, born in very quick succession - Amenadiel, their eldest; Zeke, the bolshy one; Gabriel, a textbook case of Middle Child Syndrome gone wild; Raphael, empath extraordinaire; and Uriel, a know-it-all on a celestial scale. He remembers holding each of them as tiny newborns, curled into the crook of His elbow with little naked wings tucked against their backs, and feeling... _empty_. 

None of them were telepaths. He knew it from the moment He first held them, when His mind reached for theirs and His gentle greeting nudge rebounded back at Him off the walls protecting their insulated little minds. There was _something_ , like a sharp edge of a nail catching at the edge of His subconscious, a _spark_ of higher intelligence - Amenadiel even stopped wailing at the touch, stretching a hand up towards His face with a questioning burble - but His mind couldn’t get through. The archangels sensed Him, very faintly, but they were...on a different frequency. At best, they might be able to tell when He was nearby. 

He remembers the unconditional love Asherah felt every time, cooing and fawning over each new baby, singing soft lullabies as they clutched at Her finger. Motherhood came to her as natural as breathing, while He’d lie awake at night trying to make Himself feel the same. Mostly He was...numb. Was He supposed to feel the way She did? Was He supposed to be that excited? If anything, He felt almost like He was grieving - not just for Himself, still stranded with the Silence, but for each of His children, who would never know anything but the emptiness of their own minds. 

They would think this aching loneliness was _normal_. 

He wouldn’t wish that on _anyone_. 

  
  


When the boys were tiny, He’d anticipated billions of years of neediness and constant care and screeching ahead of Him. But really, it felt like He’d barely had time to get used to the routine of caring for the infant Amenadiel before He was cutting his first tooth, and then toddling, and then sobbing about his itchy wings as his first set of downy baby feathers came through. 

Before long He found Himself teaching Amenadiel to fly and keep his slate grey fuzz clean and tidy. Amenadiel would practice on Him, his clumsy little fingers combing through great black feathers longer than he was tall. 

When he finished, sometimes Amenadiel would fling his arms around His neck in a tight hug and tell Him, “I love you, Father.” 

“I love you too,” He’d respond, automatically; He’d been with Asherah long enough to know it was the expected response. But the words felt hollow. 

And...He _wanted_ to love Amenadiel, wanted it desperately. _Tried_ to love him the way he deserved. He’s been a good father, He knows He has. He never told any of them that the love Asherah came by so naturally felt distant and alien to Him. 

He got there eventually, in His own way. He loves His kids, all of them. But He loves them in a way they will never be able to feel, and He will never be able to feel whatever love they say they have for Him. He sees it every time He looks at them, how disconnected they are, how isolated. His failure reflected back at Him from every wide-eyed, upturned face.

_Would they still love You_ ? A little voice in His head would whisper, every time He repeated the words. _Would they still love You if they knew?_

  
  


Amenadiel and Ezekiel were just beginning to toddle when He first realised His children might’ve inherited more from Him than He thought. 

Asherah liked to take Their children for walks through the Silver City’s broad streets. and She flagged Him down one day on Her way back. Amenadiel was perched on Her hip, getting too big to be carried, but drowsy and clinging to the gauze of Her gown. 

“Elohim, watch this,” She said, and held up Her spare hand, fingers folded loosely into a cage around something in Her palm. To Amenadiel, She prompted, “Do it again, love. Show your Father.”

She opened Her fingers, and a delicate swallowtail lifted off from Her cupped hand, patterned in iridescent yellow and black. Amenadiel made a plaintive whine and reached a chubby arm towards the butterfly, and in that moment, time stopped. 

Well - no. 

It didn’t _stop_ , exactly. He could still feel it moving. Asherah and Amenadiel seemed equally unaffected. But the butterfly had all but frozen, its wings moving in dramatic slow motion, and Amenadiel’s tiny fist had almost snatched it from the air before Asherah snagged his hand to stop him. “Don’t, angel. You’re too small. You’ll hurt it.”

Startled by the interruption, Amenadiel’s gaze wavered from the butterfly, and abruptly it began to move at normal speed again, fluttering out of reach. 

He stared at His son, so little and so unaware of the power He’d just demonstrated. Amenadiel, suddenly shy, gave Him a gummy smile and buried his face in his Mother’s neck. 

Asherah looked at Him, Her hand idly petting Amenadiel’s back, and _beamed_. 

  
  


It wasn’t just Amenadiel. 

It was _all of them_.

  
  


And then They had the twins. 

Michael and Samael share a face, but that’s about all they ever had in common. Those two were night and day from birth. Samael inherited Asherah’s light, the same light that attracted Him to Her in the first place, a soul so vibrant it made him glow from within[27]. Even as a baby, he was the most extroverted of Their children, always cooing and babbling from inside their shared crib, clinging to the bars and reaching up His arms to be held whenever someone walked past. 

Michael was the opposite; quiet and introverted, prone to curling his own wings around himself rather than reaching out. Michael was born with a hunched shoulder[28], which should really have been the only way to tell them apart before their first set of downy baby feathers grew in, but He had it nailed from day one: Sammy was the one who’d throw a fit if you _didn’t_ pick him up. Michael would start screaming if you _did_. 

With Samael, He _finally_ felt that immediate rush of love, without the long delay. With Samael, parenting _finally_ came naturally; at long last, one of His children preferred Him to Asherah. He’d hover over the crib at night, long after Asherah had fallen asleep with Michael snuggled against Her chest, watching Sammy sleep, stroking his downy hair. Was he warm enough? Was he having good dreams? There was no way for Him to chase away the nightmares, keep watch over His child’s mind the way Mother had once done for Him. 

He never wanted Sammy to have bad dreams. Never wanted him to know what it felt like to be hurt or lonely or unhappy. He’d barely put him down at first, hoping it would make up for the lack of telepathic connection. 

He never wanted Samael to know what it felt like to be Him. 

  
  


In time, the boys began their education. She taught them reading and writing, art and music and languages. He taught them the science Mother had once passed down to Him, taught them discipline and obedience and how to fight with the weapons His travels had familiarized Him with. 

Amenadiel cheerfully showed up for his first training session with Ezekiel and Gabriel in tow. At that age, Gabe was lugging Sammy around like a toy. He’d plop him down in a corner of the training yard and drift between amusing him with twigs and pebbles, and joining in with the exercises the older boys were practicing, dropping in and out of the lesson as he pleased.

Amenadiel was a natural warrior, which was apparently something to be proud of, so He was. Ezekiel, on the other hand, was a fat and uncoordinated thing in his padded armor, and before long Amenadiel spent most of those sessions beating him soundly around the training yard with his blunted practice broadsword. He had to step in a couple of times to chide him for going too hard on his little brother. A couple of times it’d looked like Amenadiel wanted to bite back at those reprimands, but in the end he always bowed his head and accepted the criticism with grace. 

They were really blessed with Their eldest. He was such an obedient, eager-to-please child. 

  
  


Samael was the opposite.

All too quickly, he grew into a boisterous tornado of a boy, all gangly limbs and dirty knees and messy curls he wouldn’t let Asherah cut, the polar opposite of quiet, taciturn Michael. 

Sammy had Gabriel on some kind of pedestal; they were an inseparable, chaotic pair of pains in His backside. He can’t count the number of times He caught Samael up to his neck in some trouble Gabriel must’ve put him up to, red-handed and shamefaced. Gabe very rarely showed up to take the blame, but Sammy never threw him under the bus. 

He noticed quickly that while Their youngest had his Mother’s light, Sam definitely inherited His soul, soft-hearted and musical and innocently charismatic. 

Except...sometimes, it was like he _didn’t_. More than any of Their other children, more even than Gabriel, Samael was demanding and feisty and fiercely independent, prone to charging into fights he had no hope of winning out of some bizarre need to "defend" himself when he believed he'd been wronged. It disturbed him. Gabriel was a prankster and a menace, true, but it was all innocent, intended to be fun. Sam - 

Well, Sam had a strong if overzealous sense of justice, a short fuse, and a tendency towards explosive outbursts and angry tears. 

He remembers one particular incident in the training yard shortly after the twins were big enough to join the older boys. Zeke solidly trounced Sam in that lesson, while He shouted out steps and reminders from a distance. Samael wasn’t a natural warrior - that much was obvious from the first time a weapon was placed in his hand, he was far too gentle - but Michael, watching from the sidelines, made an offhand comment about his little brother’s frustrated tears, and that short temper _snapped_. 

Sammy flung his practice blade to the ground and hurled himself on Michael with a howl of rage, fists swinging. Ezekiel and Amenadiel rushed in to separate them, and Sammy’s wings were thrashing to get at Michael, arms throwing punches, even as he was pulled away by the scruff of the neck. 

He was fascinating. It was fascinating to _watch_ him, the way his mind worked, so different to the other boys. None of His children inherited His telepathy, but the older angels came to feel almost like extensions of Himself as they grew; His will was their will, and they didn’t seem to want it to be any other way. Samael was so independent. So stubborn. 

It was baffling. 

It was _terrifying_. 

What had They Created?

* * *

[18] Because He had those, by then. They weren't blue yet, but He _had_ them.

[19] Which, He'd just like to clarify, is a name humans made up. Enochian is...very different to any language humanity has come up with and would be /impossible/ for a human to speak - tone is conveyed partly by the posture of one's wings, for example, and there are a bunch of sounds a human mouth wouldn't be able to replicate, three of which are used in its original name.   
  
Besides. By the time humanity needed a name for His language, He and Asherah were...well. He didn't much care what they called Her mother tongue, to be quite honest.

[20] In His defence, it's a language that's practically impossible to master as a non-native speaker. She couldn't have been more awkward and inconvenient to fall for if She tried. But at least He gave it His best effort.

[21] He did actually try to write Her a song once or twice. The sort of cringey love song every Zayn, Dick and Harry is churning out onto the Top 40 these days. But it was...bad. Real bad. His verbal singing voice is...not one of His many talents.  
  
You don't want to hear His attempt at 'Workin' Nine To Five' after a few too many Bud Lights.

[22] This is still mostly true. He can however say with reasonable confidence that He _is_ , in fact, handsome, at least by human standards.   
  
Samael rather resembles Him, after all, and humans of all genders are drawn to _him_ , in spite of, you know, his personality.

[23] Not that it would've been much of a city back then. It was infinitely smaller when it had only His own family to sustain, rather than countless billions of human souls. Most of it was open land, endless rolling hills as far as the eye could see, dotted with peaceful lakes and winding rivers.

[24] _Heaven_. The Enochian word for paradise. Officially that's what They named it, but...well. Since Their marriage fell apart, The Silver City has always seemed more apt.

[25] He _had_ given Himself genitalia, several thousand years ago. But He only installed it because it looked entertaining, picked the option that was most amusing to look at, and while it did work, He wasn't sure it was actually plumbed in properly. There was a not-zero chance He was firing dust instead of bullets, if you follow His drift.

[26] As it turned out, they did need to Create the archangels - a small matter of incompatible internal biology. Asherah was eager to join in, enthusiastic about "sharing this with Him", but She had no inherent ability of Her own and Her work was clumsier than the youngest spore's when She tried to mould the projection He brought up for Her, so it was just easier for Him to shoo Her aside and do most of the work solo. And He did very well, if He does say so Himself. You could DNA test them, and they’d show up as His. Sometimes He’d rather they wouldn’t, but that’s parenthood for you.

[27] Kid could _literally_ light up a room. He distinctly remembers Azrael...when she was very small, she had a completely irrational fear of the dark. He'd hear her running down the hall to Sam's bedroom in the middle of the night, to snuggle in under his faintly luminous wings. Like a nightlight.

[28] That's entirely His fault. He dropped the baby.   
  
Fortunately there was no actual soul in the body at the time, so it wasn't like He dropped a _living_ baby, and He's never told Michael that that's what happened to his shoulder, but...well. Juggling seven children isn't easy, and sometimes You just...drop one. It happens.

Stop looking at Him like that.


	3. Let There Be Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> God gets stuck into a new project, Goddess gets offended, and Samael gets some father-son bonding time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to my wonderful betas!

> _“But things change, don’t they? Dad started going into the garage and tinkering with a little project He called ‘Humanity’.” -_ **_Lucifer Morningstar_ ** _,_ Everything’s Coming Up Lucifer

* * *

There was really only one challenge left. It was time for Him to Create His own universe.

As the twins gained independence, more and more He’d found Himself tuning out Asherah’s chatter or the boys’ bickering to lose Himself in theoretical astrophysics and imaginary biological blueprints. The thought of burying Himself in something new, something bigger than anything else He’d ever worked on, was intoxicating. It lit a fire in Him the likes of which He hadn’t felt in a long time. 

His universe, like all universes, began as a blank canvas, a skeleton containing nothing more than loose matter and an expanding rush of heat. The hardest part of Creating it was separating it from the Silver City; He wasn’t living in the Outer Rim any longer, and Asherah’s universe was already surrounded on all sides by other dimensions, so He couldn’t just bud His new universe at the multiverse’s farthest edge. He couldn’t risk going back there, so close to the Silence. So He had to gently push a cluster of existing universes outwards and squeeze the new one into the gap they left behind, without damaging the delicate shell of any of the others[29] . It was fiddly, and He was out of practice, but finally, He had it settled neatly amongst the older universes surrounding it, and He could _really_ get to work. 

The first issue He encountered was the exhaustion brought on by having to pop back and forth between universes. He’d always had to spend hundreds or thousands of years recuperating between jumps - which now posed something of a problem. That’s why He set up the Hall of Being, in the end - a workshop of sorts housed in the topmost dome of the White Spire, where He housed an immense projection of His far-flung universe. It hovered, translucent and ethereal, in mid-air, stretching the length and width of the immense round room. A great, celestial hologram in soft, wispy colour. From there, He could manipulate His Creation as He wished - zoom in or out on a certain planet, paint the canvas with nebulae and space dust...whatever He wanted, but from the comfort of His own home.  
  


The Hall was where He’d go to hide when He needed a break, when He was tired of His noisy kids and exasperated wife, when He felt like He might lose His mind if He didn’t take some time for Himself. As such, it was supposed to be strictly off-limits to the growing, boisterous archangels. He knew all too well, if He gave the little monsters free rein to wander in as they pleased, they’d drop something, or break something, or explode the universe. If fatherhood had taught Him anything by then, it was that you should never underestimate the stupid shit your kids will do and then expect you to fix[30] .

* * *

One thing He noticed about the archangels as they grew was they didn’t seem capable of having the relationship He remembered having with His own siblings as a spore. They were argumentative and short-tempered, constantly bickering and telling tales for the smallest things, unable to understand why the others felt the way they did. The easy symbiosis He’d expected them to share just didn’t exist, and it made them cruel to one another. 

They were _broken_ , fundamentally broken, in ways he still wasn’t entirely sure how to fix.

Asherah claimed it was normal for siblings to fight, but He wasn’t convinced. It seemed it was constant, the clash of brother against brother. Uriel, tugging Asherah’s skirts and sobbing about being excluded, mostly for being “too young” and “too small”. Amenadiel, smug and bossy, throwing his weight around to exercise authority. Samael and Michael scrapping like feral cats over a shared possession or being called a name, both yelling and complaining bitterly as they were pulled apart. 

He can clearly remember finding Samael skulking outside His studio, sat hunched over like a gargoyle on the top step with his chin resting on his knees and his arms wrapped around them. At the sound of His footsteps, the boy scrambled to his feet, sniffling and hurriedly wiping away tears with the heels of his hands. “Father!”

Oh, for goodness’ sake. 

“Sammy,” He acknowledged, hovering awkwardly a few steps from the studio doorway. He’d never had much patience for this sort of behaviour, even when the boys were babies; never known what to do with tears and snot and clinging arms. He’d always felt like He was floundering. How are you supposed to know what someone needs when you have no way of seeing inside their mind? He cleared His throat, awkward and off-kilter. “You know you’re not meant to be up here.”

“I know,” Samael said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“This is My private space.”

Sam nodded. “I wasn’t gonna go in there, I promise. I just wanted to get away from Amenadiel.”

He heaved a sigh. “What did he do this time?”

Sam took a deep, shuddering breath, and rubbed his eyes again. “It’s not fair, Father! He told Mother _I_ broke that ugly old vase in the Chapel of Reflection but I _didn’t_ , it was _him_ , him and Ezekiel.”

He frowned. Shrugged. “So tell Her that.”

“I did!” Sam protested. “She told me not to tell tales! And then She sent us outside, and Ezekiel pushed me and said I was a stupid liar. I’m _not_ a liar, I’m _not_ , and he _shouldn’t say it_ because it’s _not_ true and-”

Ugh. Even remembering it makes Him grit His teeth. At the time, He hadn’t been able to decide whether Samael’s complaining irritated or upset Him. His youngest was such a sensitive soul, so disturbed by anything he thought of as injustice. But the whining voice grated on His nerves. He had little patience for juvenile arguments; Sam should’ve been able to feel what Amenadiel was feeling because they should all _understand_ one another’s minds. Damn it!

_Distract him_ , He thought wildly, because He could tell His youngest was ramping up for an explosion of primitive emotional nonsense, and without thinking He opened the door to the studio. “Never you mind Amenadiel, Sammy. How about you come sit in here with Me for a while and calm down?”

It worked[31] . Samael stopped venting mid-sentence, brought up short, and closed his mouth with a snap. Wide-eyed, he nodded, and followed Him into the studio. 

At the sight of the fledgling universe, sprawling lazily in midair, Sammy let out a gasp of delight. He darted forward to make a wide circle at high speed around the room, arms held out wide to feel space dust filter through his outstretched fingers. When he finally came to a breathless stop, his puffy eyes were shining and his tears had evaporated. “It’s so beautiful, Father! What is it?”

Sam’s enthusiasm was... _nice_. Asherah had enjoyed being involved in designing the archangels, and had even seemed interested in learning more about Creation at one time, but He’d become sick of explaining the simplest concepts to Her over and over and eventually She’d lost Her temper and snapped at Him, some nonsense about “making her feel stupid” and “being patronizing”. Surely Samael would be less unreasonable? 

“It’s uh. Well, it’s a universe.”

And it wasn’t finished, not by a long shot. He had so much work still to do. So if He could just get through these questions and gently chivvy Sam back out the door, then -

Sammy’s dark curls bobbed as he cocked his head, examining a cloud of celestial dust at about chest height, his wings spread to keep him balanced. His little body vibrated with enthusiasm and his eyes glowed. “Did you build it? What’s it called? Why is it so dark? Does anything live there? Can we visit? Can we go there right now?”

Ancestors, that kid could talk.

“I did,” He confirmed, reaching to reel Sammy in by the back of his tunic - but the boy dodged Him and took off for the closest planet to peer at it, his nose barely an inch from the gaseous surface. “And no, nothing lives there yet. It’s not ready.”

“Will anything live there _ever_?” Sam poked tentatively at the planet with his forefinger, his fluffy wings holding him inches off the floor. Whatever he seemed to be expecting clearly didn’t happen, for he touched it again, with the palms of his hands this time, giggling. He spun it, slowly at first and then as fast as he could, setting it to swirling at a nauseating speed. 

He felt His mouth quirk up at the side. The questions never stopped with this kid. There was always more curiosity, always another where or when or why. “Eventually.” 

“It feels so fuzzy[32] . What’s it called?”

“It...it doesn’t have a name.”

“Oh.” That brought Sam to a stop for a few seconds, forehead wrinkling with confusion. “Why not?”

He blinked. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t. Universes don’t need names.”

“Huh.” Sam seemed to be considering that intently. “What’s it made of?”

He was _not_ about to go into the intricate specifics of Creation. Not with a kid with a finger-snap attention span. He gave an enigmatic shrug. “All sorts of weird and wonderful things.”

“Is that what these are?” It was the workbench that Sam made a beeline for then, rummaging around in all His containers of materials. “Stuff for making Your universe?”

“Mm-hmm.” And they were all so neatly stored and arranged. How long would that last with Sam spilling things all over the tabletop and putting them back in the wrong places? 

“Can You make something now? Can I watch?”

It had been such a long time. So many eons since He had had someone wanting to watch Him work just for the sheer pleasure of it. Asherah had been far more interested in the end result - a baby - than in the process of Creation. He looked from Sammy to the stool at the workbench, and back again, and then gestured for the boy to move aside as He took His seat. “Hm. Very well. Any requests?”

Sam pressed in close behind Him as He picked up His tools, peeking over His shoulder, and He was suddenly, vividly reminded of watching Mother work when He was just a spore. He’d been filled with the same starry-eyed fascination at how talented she was, how easy it seemed to be for her. It made something hurt in His chest, seeing that same wonderment in Sam’s gaze. 

For the first time in many millions of years, He didn’t feel quite so alone.

* * *

He’d only intended to take Samael into the studio that once, but his enthusiasm was catching. 

Before long it felt strange not having Sam hovering around while He worked.

* * *

“Dad,” Sam said one day as they sat side by side, Sam watching Him arrange atoms into planets. “I’ve been thinking…”

He made a distracted _hmmm?_ sound, turning it into a question as Samael trailed off. The boy fidgeted, twisting his fingers in his lap in an uncharacteristic show of nervousness. He put down the partially-finished planet He was working on. “Spit it out, buddy.”

“Do You think _I_ could Create like You do?”

He considered it for a moment, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of His lip. “I don’t know. It’s certainly _possible_. You weren’t designed to Create, but We didn’t expect Amenadiel to be able to stop time, either. That’s part of Creation. And we didn’t intend for Gabriel to be able to alter reality. So...it might be that you have your own gifts.”

“Might I try? To make something, I mean. For the universe. By myself.”

He wasn’t expecting that. So far, Sammy had been content to watch, or occasionally to fetch and carry tools and materials to make him feel useful. His brothers would probably have remained content to do that. 

Still, perhaps He should’ve expected it. Of all His children, Samael was the most like Him, the most like a spore of His own kind. He wasn’t shy to offer ideas, and he had plenty of them, and had he been a spore raised in a traditional family, this interest would be a good sign. 

Perhaps at least one of His children would be somewhat normal. 

“Very well,” He responded indulgently, turning back to His work. “Why don’t you give it a try, and if you can make something, we’ll see if it’s good enough to use.”

* * *

  
  


He didn’t see much - or anything - of Sammy for several days after that. He holed himself up in his room, refusing to come out, shouting at anyone who knocked on the door to _go away, I’m busy!_

When he finally emerged, he was tousle-haired with red-rimmed eyes, like he hadn't been sleeping, but the smile on his face was triumphant. He appeared in the arched doorway to the workshop and hovered there, holding something gently in the palm of one hand with the other cupped over the top of it, like he was trying to stop it escaping[33] .

His voice was careful, wary, as He turned to face him. “What’ve you got there, Sammy?”

Sammy brought it over silently, which was most unlike him, and shyly opened his cupped hands. 

By then, He was billions of years old. At that age, there was very little left in a peaceful, suburban universe like Asherah’s that could startle him, and He’d considered Himself impossible to surprise in the Silver City, given that He Created it. But what Sam showed Him that day took His breath away. 

A white-hot, molten ember resting harmlessly against bare skin, turning his palms translucent and emitting a glow powerful enough to fuel a galaxy. A miniscule fragment of Samael’s own light, the light he’d inherited from his Mother. A part of his _soul_.

It was a star. 

He had been the most powerful of His siblings, but even He’d been thousands of years old before He even attempted to Create a star. This was no simple asteroid or uninhabitable planet. This was advanced Creation, and he’d _improvised_. Lacking experience, he had to have come up with the idea to use his own light on the fly. 

He held out His own hand and Samael reluctantly tipped the star into His palm. “I thought - I mean - You didn’t have any of these yet. It’s not very good, but I worked really hard on it, and - do You like it?”

There was a lump in His throat, but He wasn’t sad. He was smiling, swamped by emotion He didn’t truly understand. This form was truly baffling, sometimes. He held the star up at eye level, pinched between His thumb and forefinger, like how you’d examine a jewel, and then set it tenderly back into Sammy’s hands. The boy held it reverently, a burning shard of his own soul, instinctively mantling his fluffy little wings around his prize. 

“I do,” He told him, getting up from His workbench and leading Samael over to the hologram with a hand on his shoulder. “I really do, Sammy. It’s perfect. Where d’you think we should put it?”

* * *

Pride, He thinks later as He lays in bed beside Asherah’s sleeping form. That’s what that feeling was. 

He was proud of Samael.

  
  


* * *

Asherah...didn’t seem to like how much time He spent in the Hall of Being. It took Him a while to realise what the difference was in Her tone when She’d see Him after a stint of Creating. 

“There He is,” She’d greet Him from across the breakfast table, “Come down from His ivory tower to remember what His family looks like.” 

And He’d agree with Her, because Her tone was pleasant and her face smiling. And really - how was He supposed to know She was angry? He didn’t have access to Her mind. He couldn’t tell what She was thinking. If She resented the amount of free time He was taking for Himself, She should’ve _said_ something. 

So He placated Her with a new nest of babies, so She’d have a new one to mother whenever the previous one got old enough to be independent - once they weren’t so helpless and cuddly anymore, She didn’t seem to know exactly what to do with them. 

Having more angels didn’t please everyone, however. He can remember the day They introduced Samael to Azrael, his new sister; he’d stood on tiptoes beside the crib, scowling down at the sleeping baby with a face like thunder and his hands clenched around the bars so tightly his knuckles had gone white. 

“Send her back where You got her,” he’d demanded with righteous fury. “Send her back!” 

He’d been...kind of horrified, honestly, horrified and _shocked_ . To reject a sibling...to reject a sibling so _harshly_ ...it was unthinkable, and so out of character for Sammy. His youngest was a certifiable pain in His ass, but He’d never known Samael to be _cruel_ . It made Him angry, made Him defensive, like insulting His Creation was an insult to _Him_.

But She only laughed, and stroked Sam’s hair, and said gently, “You can’t _unmake_ a baby, my darling.”

Samael’s pretty little face twisted into a truly ugly expression, and he turned to scowl at Him over his shoulder. “ _He_ could. _He_ could make her go back. He’s God! He just doesn’t want to.”

He...can’t say He had particularly strong feelings either way, save for a restless urge to get back to His universe. But Asherah wanted more babies, and so more babies She would have. 

“No,” He said firmly, meeting Asherah’s glowing gaze over Sammy’s head and wondering if He even meant it. “I don’t.”

She beamed at Him.

* * *

It was enough to make Her happy. 

For a while.

  
  


* * *

  
  
[29] He wasn’t all that keen on a couple of the universes His new one would touch, shady-looking neighbourhoods all round, but He couldn’t exactly move the Silver City. And the chances of anything from those universes breaking into His were so miniscule they may as well be non-existent. So He decided He’d make do.

  
  
[30] Case in point: Gabriel's idea of teaching the twins to fly involved enthusiastically tossing them from a top floor window and hoping they learned on the way down.

  
  
[31] Of course it did. The other archangels were a bit short of curiosity across the board, but Sam always had it in oodles. Of course He wanted to be the first to see what was behind the forbidden door of Dad's studio.

  
  
[32] What it actually feels like to touch the fabric of the universe is static, a faint buzzing against the pads of your fingertips, the same sort of ominous, rolling feeling that precedes a heavy storm. Usually that's accompanied by strong smell of ozone. That’s how He can work out where the fabric of reality between worlds is thinnest.

  
He hadn't been able to sense that rift between dimensions until adulthood, until - until His first jump. It was mind-boggling that Sammy could feel it at such a young age.

  
[33] His immediate thought was that it was a frog. Sammy was always bringing things inside that didn’t belong there, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d set some poor animal from the gardens loose indoors in the hope that it’d startle an unsuspecting Michael.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was gonna add in a map of the Silver City, but I have no idea how to actually do that, RIP

**Author's Note:**

> So would y'all like to have some trivia at the end of chapters or nah? There is a lot more worldbuilding in this than I have been able to cram in.
> 
> Fun fact: this was originally supposed to be a crossover fic! God's species is a reference to another fandom - shoutout to anyone who can figure out what He is!


End file.
